


Thicker Than Water

by Archangel67



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-03-15
Updated: 2012-03-14
Packaged: 2017-11-01 23:19:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/362383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Archangel67/pseuds/Archangel67
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>July Ortez was the only child of a nut case mom and a dead beat dad... When it comes to being a Winchester, though, she'll fit in just fine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thicker Than Water

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this at the behest of people on Tumblr. Thought the idea of an AU where Sam and Dean have a little sister was pretty cool.

July Sierra Sunset Ortez.

You only got a name like that when your parents either had a very poor sense of humor or happened to be hippies. July was lucky enough to have a mother who fit both of those categories. Most folks didn’t know her middle names, although having that many initials tended to make people nervous for some reason. As if that didn’t make her weird enough, her mother was a professional psychic. Professional in the sense that she read palms in a shitty storefront in a strip mall. She hardly made any money, but somehow they had always managed to stay fed and clothed and pay the rent on their one bedroom apartment.

Honestly, it was embarrassing to have to tell people that your mom was a flower child whack job. When she could, she lied and said that she worked at a grocery store two towns over. Nobody ever questioned it because nobody really cared. Hell, her dad hadn’t even cared enough to stick around. Although she guessed she had to give him props for showing up once a year on her birthday, as if that made up for leaving her crazy mother high and dry.

When she was really young he would show up with a doll or a stuffed animal or a frilly dress that she would never have occasion to wear. When she turned eight they spent the whole weekend together, driving two whole states away to go to see Metallica, surviving on peanut butter sandwiches and a twelve pack of root beer. Her mother hated the band, which meant that Jules loved it more than breathing.

When he was there, everything seemed okay for a little while. He’d put his hand on her hair and smile and look at her like she was the only person that mattered in the whole damn world. In fact, he hardly ever got mad at her. Only once, during that trip, when she had found a strange little leather book in his bag when she had been looking for toothpaste. It looked like he had decided to write a book about monsters, but there were phone numbers and names and none of it really made any sense to her. He had snatched it from her hands and said in a low, even voice, that it was not a book for little girls to read. She had never seen him look that scared before, and that _scared_ her. John tried to make it up to her by taking them out for ice cream.

It was super effective.

That was the last year she’d seen him or heard from him, though. At this point it was hard to remember much about him at all, except for how angry she became every time even thought about his stupid, scruffy face. Dead beat dad. That was all he was. He had probably gotten bored and moved on. He had never really seemed like the sort who could handle having kids full time. Who took an eight year old to see Metallica, anyway?

And for that matter, who gave a seven year old a butterfly knife?

July was smart, but she wasn’t motivated. She got out of high school by the skin of her teeth and had no plans to go to college. She would have failed out, even if her mom said that John had taken out savings bonds in her name for when she was old enough to go. No point in wasting money that her mom needed more than she did.

With no car and basically nothing to her name, July knew if she didn’t get out now, she never would. There was nothing keeping her in Texas anyway. Mom was batshit, she didn’t really have and friends, and she certainly had never let anybody close enough to become intimate. She had textbook daddy issues, but at least she knew it.

Hitchhiking was dangerous, but you had to be an idiot to let yourself get picked up by the wrong sort of people. No scary pickup trucks or big windowless vans for her. No sir. Besides, she had her knife. She managed to get to Nashville unmolested but she decided that it might be worthwhile to invest in a ride of her own after having a few incredibly awkward conversations with creepy old men and one creepy old woman.

She found a job at a local diner and a cheap studio apartment outside of town. It wasn’t much but it was enough. Finally she was out on her own and things were starting to make sense. For a nineteen year old with no life experience she was doing pretty well – thank you very fucking much.

. . . . .

July let out a low grumble of impatience. It was going on midnight and these two assholes were still sitting in her section. They had finished eating hours ago. For a while they had just been taking up a booth that would have gotten her more customers, but at this point they were just keeping her from being able to go home. Violetta’s Diner was desperately understaffed and everyone else had already left save for the night line cook, her crypt keeper of a boss who kept her ancient ass behind the counter all hours of the day, and herself.

They had newspapers and what looked like computer print outs scattered here and there, piled, falling off of the edge of the table. Whatever the hell they were doing, it was something that could be done elsewhere.

“Y’know,” she intoned with gritty forced politeness as she refreshed the older looking one’s coffee. “This is a restaurant. Not a library.”

“Really?” He glanced up at her with vivid green eyes that had startled her at first but which she had gotten used to over the past five hours. He looked sort of like a model. She’d taken to calling him Fabio in her head. “’Cause you would make a fantastic librarian. You don’t happen to wear glasses do you?”

The younger, taller man scoffed under his breath and kept his eyes solidly on his laptop. Fabio’s partner, or brother, or boyfriend. It was kinda hard to tell, even though she had been watching them for so long. She called this one Sideburns. Once all of her other customers had left she had been stuck refreshing their coffee, staring them down from her perch beside the kitchen door, trying to will them to get the hell out. Maybe she had inherited some of that psychic nut job power from her mom. She had never believed in it until right now, but she was willing to give it a shot if it meant she could stagger home and get some sleep.

“No, I don’t wear glasses. Do y’all want more coffee?” she asked Sideburns, who gave her that startled deer-in-headlights look he had given her every single time she asked him a question. Unlike his brother/lover/whatever he didn’t seem to be terribly talkative. There was something strangely familiar about him but she couldn’t put her finger on it. She felt as if she had seen him before, but she was pretty sure she would have remembered someone who was as tall as he was. What was he, like seven feet tall?

“No, I’m good, thanks,” Sideburns said quietly as he shuffled some papers.

“We’re not keeping you, are we?” Fabio asked, turning toward her as he leaned back against the cracked vinyl booth with one arm draped over the top of it, trying way too hard to look suave. Raising an eye brow, his eyes dropped to her name tag before coming back up to her face. As if he didn’t know her name already. He’d looked at her “name tag” about ten times since they had been seated.

_July? That’s an awful pretty name. Say, July, let me get a cheeseburger with the works, side of fries, and do you guys have any pie back there? I’m a sucker for cherry pie. Thanks, sweetheart._

Guys like him made her want to vomit, just a little.

“No… ‘course not,” she said, utterly deadpan. “I love being kept an hour past when I was supposed to get off. Sleep is for the weak.”

Fabio smirked. “Sorry. We’ll get out of your hair. Just lost track of time, you know? By the way, you don’t sound like you’re from around here.” A lot of people commented on her accent, but they didn’t tend to pry. “You from Texas?”

“Paris.”

“…You’re from Paris?” Fabio stared at her, befuddled.

“Paris, Texas. Smartass.” She sighed.

“Huh. We were just in El Paso last week.”

“Which is absolutely nowhere near Paris.”

“…Touché,” he laughed. “What brought you all the way out here?”

July rubbed the bridge of her nose, glancing back toward Rita behind the front counter before turning back to Fabio. “Look, man. Unless flirting with you is going to ensure me a big tip – which I should already be getting because you’ve been sitting here for five fucking hours – I don’t feel like playing this game. How about you mind your own business and I’ll mind mine and not ask you why this one is Googling vampires like some sort of weirdo.” She motioned to Sideburns, who shot Fabio an amusingly bitchy look before shutting his laptop.

“We’re reporters,” Sideburns said with an oddly robotic quality to his voice, like he had practiced saying it before.

“Vampire reporters.”

“Weekly World News. I’m sure you’ve heard of it,” Fabio recovered for Sideburns, throwing in a wink that was entirely not necessary. “Alligators in the sewers and vampires babies and stuff like that. You know, the norm.”

“Uh-huh. Sounds riveting. So y’all said you can take your vampire story somewhere else, right?”

Either Fabio had never dealt with a woman rejecting his advances or he was really just that cocky. His tongue ran briefly over his lips and he tilted his head just a little. “Sure. You know, though, you should let me make it up to you. We’ll be in town a few days. You know any good bars around here?”

“I’m only nineteen,” July’s hazel eyes rolled toward the ceiling.

“Oh?” Fabio seemed even more interested now, if that was humanly possible.

“Dean. No.” Sideburns was packing up his laptop, piling papers together and stuffing them away into a manila folder. She was just glad that they were leaving. But as he cleared the papers away, something caught her attention:

An old, expansive leather bound three-ring journal that had bits of paper sticking out of it at odd angles as if note had been jammed between some of the pages. It had been years, but she would have been able to recognize anywhere, even if the cover was more scuffed up and stained than she remembered it.

“T-that book,” she stuttered, the words leaving her mouth before she could stop herself. “That book belongs to John. It’s not yours. Where did you get it?”

Fabio and Sideburns both turned to look at her, scarily in sync.

“What’d you say?” Sideburns gaped at her.

“How the hell do you known John Winchester?” Fabio growled, any attempt at flirtation dropped and immediately replaced by suspicion.

“He was my… Wait. How do _you_ know John Winchester?”

Looking from one man to the other, she realized that things had gone from annoying to just plain confusing and Violetta’s was not the place to figure it all out. She was going to be in for so much shit tomorrow, but some things were more important than pleasing her boss. Putting the still hot carafe down on the table top, she nodded toward the door.

“Can we go somewhere else to talk about this?”

“Yeah. Let’s.”

“Dean.” Sideburns sounded worried. “How do we know she’s not…”

“What, a psycho? A _vampire_? Come on, dude. I’m a fucking waitress. If I was an axe murderer I wouldn’t need to work here.”

“She’s got a point Sammy.” Fabio quirked an eye brow.

So their names Sam and Dean.

She liked Sideburns and Fabio better, personally.  
  


**(To Be Continued)**


End file.
